My property predictions: By Foxtons £370m guru

When will London bounce back from the slump? In his first interview since selling his estate agency, Jon Hunt says the time to buy is when people stop talking about house prices

Jon Hunt: 'If I knew what the market was going to do I'd be extremely rich' - says £360m Hunt

What must it be like - to collect £370m, personally, for selling your business? More pertinently, try to imagine how it feels to know that when you sold was right at the very peak of the market - another few weeks later and it crashed.

These and other questions are in my mind as I head for breakfast with Jon Hunt, the founder and until last summer, the majority owner of Foxtons, the fiercely go-getting London estate agency.

The man whom sold at the top of the property market

I've met Hunt before - most recently immediately after he'd clinched the sale and right before house prices nose-dived.

Things were very different then. London was awash with tales of homes changing hands for ridiculous sums and owners raking in vast profits after no time at all. Then, bang, it all ended.

The credit crunch bit and values tumbled. Especially hard-hit, judging by their squeals and the 'for sale' signs going up over their branches, were the estate agents themselves.

But not Hunt. The man who transformed the industry in the capital with Foxtons' aggressive tactics - he's been known to exhort staff to 'go to war' for their clients and his chain was associated with ripping-down rivals' boards and erecting its own and the ubiquitous Minis - was sitting very pretty indeed. Only the previous day, this newspaper carried an article about the number of Foxtons vehicles parked in a line off Hampstead Heath. It's become a London litmus paper of just how bad things have become: how many Minis are laid-up outside the local Foxtons.

A family man with a four-storey basement for classic cars

None of that matters to Hunt. At 55, married to Lois, a former nurse, with four children, Max, Emma, Georgie and Harry, he's got more money than he will ever need. He owns Heveningham Hall, in Suffolk (it has 25 bedrooms, 19 bathrooms and 12 receptions) and a London home in Kensington Palace Gardens. I say 'a London home' but that hardly does it justice. He's spending, in the estimate of an architect who has seen the plans, 'tens of millions' on transforming the Grade-II listed house into a super-rich playground. He intends to dig out a 50ft deep hole, equivalent to four storeys, to contain a sports hall and museum for his collection of Ferraris.

He has the bearing and manner of a former military man - 'like an ex-SAS officer' is how one property insider described him. Impossibly neat, his hair clipped just-so, the knot of his tie absolutely perfect, his shoes so polished they dazzle, he could pass, even now, for a serving soldier.

He grew up in an Army family and went to Millfield, the sporty boarding school in Somerset. He left with a few O-levels, went into the Army, did the basic training and quit. He headed for Canada, stayed there a while but when immigration officers came calling, returned to the UK, to an estate agent near Guildford. He remained with them for seven years before striking out on his own, in 1981, with Foxtons.

Then, last year, he was gone. His new lair bears a remarkable resemblance to ... a branch of Foxtons. The chairs are bright yellow, there's a large flat screen TV blasting out Bloomberg business news and in the corner is a blue Yamaha 500cc racing bike. The coffee is bubbling away.

Congratulations, I say, you must be chuffed to have got out when you did? He's deadpan. 'I'd been an estate agent since I was 18 - the decision to move had to happen some time.'

Selling a life's work

But he must have been a genius to go when he did? He shakes his head. 'When you press the button to sell, all the advisers tell you it will take months but it takes about a year. In my case, it took nine months.' In the end, Foxtons went to private equity group BC Partners.

From its offices just off Pall Mall, BC Partners specialises in major buyouts, mostly in Europe. It manages funds of £8.6bn and has so far made 67 deals, among them the takeovers of Fitness First and Baxi boilers. At Foxtons, it has kept the existing management in place. The gamble, having bought at the top of the market, is that the agency's substantial lettings business will continue to flourish, while hoping for a bounceback in sales.

Hunt's eyes twinkle as he speaks - he knows how timely he was and what people suppose. If anything, he maintains, his face as straight as the crease in his trousers, he was worried about getting out too soon. 'In the early part of last year things were going so well that my thought was am I selling too early? If you remember, there was a rampant market.' Finally, he pauses and he's grinning now. 'But I did think: This is roughly the right time and if you're going to go, go now.' He adds: 'I'm absolutely not a genius. But I have been in property since I was 18. If I knew what the market was going to do I'd be extremely rich.'

He's laughing. He realises what he's just said. He's extremely rich, all right.

It was, he says, 'a good market to sell in. There were lots of people interested. The property market was flying. In retrospect, that was good but at the time, everyone thought it would go on and on'.

He's got no intention, contrary to newspaper reports, of returning to Foxtons. 'I wanted to go from being an agent to being a principal. I'd had enough of being an agent. The thing that stops you being a principal in property is money. If you've got money, you can go out and acquire property - and make even more money. I couldn't do that. My money was tied up in the business.'

Hunt is keen to stress his departure 'was no reflection on Foxtons. Out of all of them, Foxtons is a great company. I simply felt I'd done long enough. I'd been selling property for 40 years - that was enough'.

It annoys him, he says, that Foxtons has had such a bad press. 'It's a tough firm. Our competitors went to work and made a few phone calls. Foxtons went to work and made hundreds. If you're always beaten to a sale by a bunch of guys and gals who are constantly on it and working hard, then you will say all sorts of things about them.'

When he sold the firm, he kept the fledgling US division for himself but that has now gone. 'I closed the US. I could not see the US market recovering - it was moving down all the time. Last August, I was making $1m a month, then suddenly, I was losing $1m a month.'

What is he doing now? 'I've got big dreams. I'm doing lots of research into property but I'm in no tearing rush. I might go into hotels. I've not decided. I won't make any decision too early - I want to give it time.'

So what does it feel like, getting that fat cheque? 'First of all, you don't get a cheque these days. It automatically goes into your bank. Honestly? It felt very strange. I ran Foxtons from one to 1,400 people for 26 years. The next day was quite a change. It was over. It's a question of how you can get used to that.'

There was no question of him becoming a tax exile. 'I'm happy here. I'm going to start on my house soon.' Even that was prescient, I venture. 'I know when I bought it, the price looked cheap. I paid £15.75m and since then one has been valued at £117m and two have gone for £70m - £80m.'

But, he says: 'I didn't buy it to make a profit. I bought it to live in.' He's been planning his improvements ever since and building work, he says, will start soon. How much will it cost? He raises his hands. 'I don't know yet - I don't want to think about it.'

His pride and joy in the new-look home will be the cars. 'I'm building a private car museum. I love old Ferraris and old Art Deco French cars. I've got a list of 100 cars I'd like to put together. It's all about engine numbers and chassis numbers,' he adds, sensing he's not in the presence of an aficionado. How many has he got so far? 'Eleven and that's after 20 years' collecting.'

What many would like to know is what Hunt thinks of the market now. He nods. 'I've been through two major recessions, in 1972-74 and 1988-94. This will be the third. It will last from now until whenever. The problem is that 'whenever'. What would be nice is if a house drops by 25% one week and comes back the next.

'But the property market isn't like that - it doesn't go off a cliff and climb back at the same rate. It goes down rapidly and comes back slowly. In 1988, prices started falling, they stayed down and it took until 1998 for them to get back to their 1988 level. That was slow - 10 years.'

This time he doesn't know how long prices will remain on the valley floor, as he puts it or whether they are even at the bottom. His counsel is 'to allow five years for recovery. The market drops 20-25%. Each year it will come back a little bit'. That shouldn't bother those people who are owner-occupiers, provided they keep their jobs. 'They've got their cashflow, they should be okay.'

But it's more desperate, he says, among those who use the market as a means of making money, usually through buy-to-lets. 'What happens is that in the boom you get this euphoria and if it goes on too long everyone thinks it will go on for ever. Everyone forgets the risk. Every time you turned on the TV there was a programme about property and relocating and cashing-in. What do their presenters know? They've not spent 14 hours every day for years working in the market.'

Prudence, he says, 'went out of the window. It took me 20 years to open 20 offices. I'm very slow. I will sit outside a property for six hours just watching the traffic flow before I decide'. He knows this sounds odd, coming from the creator of Foxtons. 'I'm extremely cautious when it comes to making property decisions.'

When will we know the fall is over? 'When people cease talking about property prices at dinner parties, when they've become so boring a topic of discussion.' That, he ventures, is the moment to strike, 'when there's blood on the street but it's drying - it's stopped flowing'. Nevertheless, his 'absolute golden rule is sell before you start looking'.

He's no doubt prices will recover. In central London, demand remains strong - for two and three-bed flats and for the top-end houses. Rich foreigners want to come here and they will prop up prices.

'I had a call from a bank the other day to see if I would help a Russian who is moving here. In May alone, he made £500m. I'm extremely optimistic. The next 20 years for London could be fantastic, subject to the politicians. They're the real problem. If only we could get another Thatcher, to put London on the map, then property prices would explode.' He hesitates. 'So it's down to Boris.' We gulp our coffee. It's time to go.